The Influence of Relative Humidity and Intrinsic Chloride on Post-excavation Corrosion Rates of Archaeological Wrought Iron

David E. Watkinson · Melanie Rimmer · Nicola J. Emmerson

38 citations0/0 files storedStudies in Conservation

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Conservation Techniques and Studies Corrosion Behavior and Inhibition Metallurgy and Cultural Artifacts

Abstract

This study examined the impact of relative humidity (RH) on the corrosion rate of 129 archaeological iron nails from two sites. Oxygen consumption of individual nails in controlled RH was used as a corrosion rate proxy to deliver quantitative data on corrosion rate as a function of RH. This was negligible at 20% RH, slow up to 40% RH for both sites, and increased rapidly at 60% RH for Roman nails from Caerleon (Wales) and at 70% RH for medieval nails from Billingsgate (London). The nails were digested and their chloride content was determined and related to their oxygen consumption at specific RH values. While a generic pattern of corrosion as a function of chloride was identified, for any single concentration of chloride corrosion rate was not predictable. Desiccation is in common use to control post-excavation corrosion of archaeological iron; quantifying how differing levels of desiccation changed corrosion rate provided a scaled tool for identifying corrosion risk, estimating object longevity, and calculating cost benefit for storage options.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.

References

2004Corrosion of iron archaeological artefacts in soil: characterisation of the corrosion system 2004Structural characterization of corrosion products on archaeological iron: an integrated analytical approach to establish corrosion forms 2009Raman Studies of Corrosion Layers Formed on Archaeological Irons in Various Media 1982Post-Excavation Changes in Iron Antiquities 2005Desiccated Storage of Chloride-Contaminated Archaeological Iron Objects

Cited by

2021Oxygen Depletion Testing of Metals 2024Beyond Heritage Science: A Review 2020Desiccated Microclimates for Heritage Metals: Creation and Management 2022Analysing Objects to Tailor Environmental Preventive Conservation 2022Archaeometallurgical Analysis of Thirteenth-Century Bronze and Iron Construction Implements from the Walls of the Frankish Castle at Arsuf/Arsur 2023Metallographic structures and corrosion: cross-section investigation of archaeological iron objects from the Qin-Han Yueyang City site in Xi’an, China 2023Practical Use of Damage Functions for Environmental Preventive Conservation and Sustainability—Examples from Naturally Ventilated Buildings

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.